Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut

'What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?'
'I don't know,' said Alice. 'I lost count.'
'She can't do Addition,' the Red Queen interrupted.
Lewis Carroll, Author (1832 - 1898)

Marry and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will also regret it... Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it. Hang yourself, and you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it... This, gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life.
-Soren Kierkegaard

Five years ago today: We just launched a cool new tool at Pyra. It's called Blogger. It's an automated weblog publishing tool.
I wish I'd have said something more visionary, like, It's going to be huge, I tell's ya! In five years, Google's* going to own it! And even the president will have a blog.
* You know, Google, the up-and-coming search engine without the portal. Yeah, they're going to be huge, too! Evan Williams on fifth anniversary of Blogger's debut The Blogger is the Media Dragon’s soulful partner of four years ...

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Beauty is in the liver of the beholder, as demonstrated by a quote of Guy Debord inside Panegyric: I have written much less than most writers, but I have drunk much more than most drinkers...
Ach, Howard Mansfield describes the endless bric-a-brac of televised conversation:
The answers do not matter. The questions do not matter. The subject is only a pretext. The flow is all that matters. TV is about itself....it will eat anything it must to survive - no item of trivia is too small, no sorrow too vast, not to be swallowed entire.

Monday, August 23, 2004

Snippets from the Aussie Fin Review Magazine: According to highly placed Liberal insider: It is easier to see the Howard battlers voting for Howard and Carr than for Latham and for Carr.
Bob Carr says that he cut himself shaving in the morning listening to Allan Jones. So turn the bloody thing off. Helena Carr says he can not. That is power.

Snippets from the SMH magazine James Reyne Singer, actor, poet:
Politics: The higher that monkey climbs that tree, the more of his fat arse you will see.
Power: Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

People want to feel that their presidents know what they're doing, that our artists are capable of masterpieces, that our weapons are invincible. That we're No. 1 in everything...
Dissent Wanted

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Author! Author! This Is Your Den The authors of the past, as distinct from the run-of-the-press journalists who often write about them, have tended to be remote figures who would rather hide under a rock, typing, than stand on top of it, speaking.
Book Dens, Towns, have bookshops aplenty and second-hand bookshops in profusion. But it is more than these. It is also representative of the reading culture that encourages these places to begin, develop and thrive. Any bookshop worth its paper knows how to satisfy the fundamental requirements of its readers. For example, knowing when to help or to leave one to browse in peace; or not using store demonstrators; not putting handwritten or typewritten "staff pick" notes under books, but letting us decide for ourselves what is worth reading; and certainly not playing radios or music of any description. The other day, in a formerly favourite secondhand bookshop, we asked for the radio to be turned down. "This is the first time in eight years that anyone has complained," said the man at the counter. Would they do the same in a library?• Australian writers lack balls! [Of Critics And Political Opinions ; Ach Can You Teach Pleasure In Books? ]
• · lot of it comes from book-jacket blurbs, which produce a repertoire of sentences that publishers would like to see in book reviews The book world has a language all of its own [Amazon DigitalRiver Reviews Drowning not Waving: James Marcus's Book Boom And Bust]
• · · Judge: Booker Sludge Tibor Fischer slogs his way through 126 novels • · · · Like immigrants of earlier generations - the Italian stonecutter tuning his radio to opera, the Irish stevedore reciting Yeats in a tavern, the Jewish tailor viewing a Yiddish production of King Lear The Classics Will Set You Free? The agents of our true liberation • · · · · Cold Beer Anyone? Real River, Real Ale, Real Books, Real Men? Manly Men's Reading Club Wins Reading Prize • · · · · · See Also We're living in a global village now and there's no "there" anymore

How did a QC from the conservative end of a conservative profession become the public voice of Australia’s voiceless refugees. For Julian Burnside it came down to a sudden realisation for which he has been preparing all his life. When delivering the Sir Ninian Stephen Lecture, The Practice of Law: Justice or Just a Job?, Julian observed:
Taking a stand is not without its cost. But as Arundhati Roy has said: A thing, once seen, cannot be unseesn, and when you have seen a great moral crime, to remain silent is as much a political act as is to speak against it.Julian shares with Czechoslovak born Tom Stoppard the view that we are all born with an instinct for justice. In Professional Foul, one of his characters tells of the child who in the playground cries “It’s not fair” and thus gives voice to ‘an impulse which precedes utterance’. Our perception of justice may be blunted by exposure to its processes. At the start of a career as a law student, we see law and justice as synonymous; later we fall into cynicism or despair as clients complain that Law and Justice seem unrelated. We might remember the observation of Bismarck, in a different context, saying “He who likes sausages or law should not see them in the making” be it in the NSW Parliamentary Library or the Public Accounts Committee.
Thomas Keneally wrote his latest book, The Tyrant’s Novel, after his visits to the Villawood Detention Centre Once Upon a Time, in 1980 AD certain Central Europeans referred fondly to the piece of soil in Villawood as their Australian Hollywood

Tracking Trends Great & Small: Final shot at the top Big Brother went to work quickly when a Dubbo-based water efficiency use adviser, Terrance Loughlin, sent out a last goodbye via email to staffers in the NSW Department of Primary Industries last Friday.
With Politicisation of the public service in the subject line, Loughlin expressed his disappointment about the way that the old NSW Agriculture, now part of DPI, and other rural agencies were being "totally gutted by the NSW Labour government.
In eras past this would not have happened because the executives of these rural agencies would have had the gumption to stand up to opportunistic politicians and their snivelling advisers.
The email was quickly removed and Loughlin was politely informed he should remove himself quick smart.
Shortly afterwards another email went out from the big boss, Barry Buffier, DPI's director-general. He said Loughlin's message "cannot be mistaken for anything other than a political stunt on his last day of duty".
Given that Loughlin is the Greens-endorsed candidate for Parkes, Buffier might have a point, although Loughlin reckons it was a "stunt" but not a political one. By Monday morning DPI staff had an edict in their in-boxes. Thanks to Loughlin no one can send a broadcast email unless Buffier, one of his deputies, or an executive director approves it.• Politicisation of the public service • · The typical Australian is educated, suburban, from a migrant background and working in a service industry. Donald Horne explores how we've changed in the 40 years since he wrote The Lucky Country We should be so lucky • · · Methuselah Mouse Prize Named after Methuselah, the Biblical figure who was supposedly the longest-lived human ever, surviving 969 years. • · · · The worst locust plague to hit NSW in 25 years is looming,: threatening to wreak economic and natural devastation • · · · · Experts warn of Ross River fever sting• · · · · · Survivor: Men vs. Women, Again? Really? Where Popular and Political Cultures Meet

Like democracy, culture is not an exclusive game played by experts such as artists and their admirers; it is an ongoing conversation within and between communities. It is a meeting place for different arguments and perspectives, an arena in which large and small problems are ventilated. Is cultural conversation becoming a monologue?

Even in a culture of winners take all, a book's power lies in its ability to erase us, to expand or contract without limit, to circle inside itself without beginning or end, to defy our imaginary timetables and lay us bare to a more basic ticking. The pages we read are a nowhen, unfolding far outside the public arena. As long as we remain in them, now reveals itself to be the baldest of inventions.
- Richard Powers

PS: Ach, Maria Vandamme, the founder of the Melba Foundation, managed to bypass the government’s arts funding white elephant, the Australia Council, to appeal directly to the federal government. In May 2004 Maria was rewarded with a $5 Million grant, over 5 years, to assist her in the production of 35 Cds for the Melba Recordings which produces high-quality classical Cds of Australian musicians for international distribution.

Friday, August 20, 2004

Two Thumbs Up. By some strange coincidence, or some tricky luck, or some googlish pressure, the hole on the Princes Highway which was mentioned yesterday morning by MEdia Dragon was (con)sealed last night by some unknown working party . Better late than never ...

Elections are due soon in the United States, Afghanistan, Iraq and Indonesia. Democracy, the creation of the Greeks, remains the least bad political system. But it has to work properly: it must remain accountable to ordinary people and not suborn power.- José Saramago

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
-Karl Popper

The count begins. How long does it take to repair a huge hole, the size of Skase variety (Spanish) suitcase, on the major highway? Take care just before you turn to the Rawson Street from the Princes Highway, heading towards the SLC AquaDot Swimming Pool, as for almost three days carr and trruck drivers of all accents have been blaming the local, state and federal authorities for the unexpected Luna, Prater, Disney, Park experience. Ach, day three!

Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Amerika is a country of children. The New Yorkers are a little more grown up, but not much. Once some friend of mine put me on a ferry to Coney Island. This, Tsutsik, I wish you could see. It is a city in which everything is for play—shooting at tin ducklings, visiting a museum where they show a girl with two heads, letting an astrologer plot your horoscope and a medium call up the soul of your grandfather in the beyond. No place lacks vulgarity, but the vulgarity of Coney Island is of a special kind, friendly, with a tolerance that says, ‘I play my game and you play your game.’ As I walked around there and ate a hot dog—this is what they call a sausage—it occurred to me that I was seeing the future of mankind. You can even call it the time of the Messiah. One day all people will realize there is not a single idea that can really be called true—that everything is a game—nationalism, internationalism, religion, atheism, spiritualism, materialism, even suicide.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shosha

Whatever you do make sure you czech out antipodean, our virtual tropical bee, Ken Parish who has a knack for tracking Red neck children playing somewhere that Red Interior ...

If you must write, you must do it in the face of all opposition. […] Do not spend too much more time on culture & reading, these are traps. When everything conspires to make the thing impossible, when you are tired, worried, with no time, or money, it is then that things get done.
~ Samuel Beckett to Claude Raimbourg, 16 May 1954

A tale of Cold River, manages to trap a tiny speck of theatre of absurd of the kommunist Czechoslovakia in amber and then put time in a bottle, forever uniting them in our collective memory and imagination ... History has failed us, but no matter

"... The most important expression which the present age has found… a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”
~ T.S. Eliot lauding 'Cold River' in our dreams ;-)

A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I prefer stuttering for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you. Smooth, fluent sentences leave me with a feeling of uncleanness, of order that hides emptiness.
~An Untouchable Fire: Remembering Aharon Appelfeld

“We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.”
W.B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil

Within a few generations almost all of us will be forgotten. Those who are not will have no bearing on how we are remembered, who we once were. We will not be there to protest, to correct. In the end we might exist only as a prop in someone else’s story: a plot device, a golem.

Only an artist can tell what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad
~ James Baldwin

Defying every expectation of what communism used to be, imagine a system where the key to success wasn’t hard work or merit, but conniving and politics. If you sold your soul to the devil, you were rewarded Hey Millennials: Communism Sucks, I Lived It

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.
— George MacDonald, born in 1824

Wisdom listens ... As the wise Vrbov Cemetery mortalist, David BenATAR, once noted even turning blood into ink is bad as "our lives are ultimately meaningless. We cannot satisfy the need for meaning in the mundane." Our human 'iron curtain like' predicament also means that it is impossible to realise genuine escape: "We are in a bind, a fix, a jam, we can't get out, and there is no one to help us ...We are caught in an "existential vise" between life and death ..."

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising ...

The Cold (War) River is finished, I am sensible how imperfectly, but certainly to the best of my limited abilities ... WE HAVE NO VOICE, AND SOMETIMES IN THIS SHORT LIFE ON EARTH WE MUST SCREAM!

"We Became River"
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
— G. K. Chesterton via AFL Legend and a Briliant Aboriginal Mittleuropean Mark Heiss

According to a quote sometimes attributed to not so great Jozef Imrich and the great Albert Einstein: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay in trouble and with problems longer."

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is nothing original about me except a little original bohemian sin.
I hope you will be treated unfairly ...

"My position is that you cannot work towards peace being peaceful. If the peace is to be one where everybody’s quiet and doesn’t open up ... share what’s unspeakable ... offer unsolicited criticism ... defend others’ rights to speak and encourage discourse — that peace is worth nothing. It reminds me of the kind of peace that was secured in my old country under the Communist regime. That is the death of democracy. That might have consequences as bad as war—bloody war and conflict. So, to prevent the world from bloody conflict, we must sustain a certain kind of adversarial life in which we are struggling with our problems in public."
~ Krzysztof Wodiczko

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

"Cold River's" history keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. [Cold as ice, but in the soulful hands the story melts ... a literary treat you, insomniacs, can enjoy for years (because that's how long it will take you to get through it ...)]
~ John le Carre

Thomas Aquinas’s ultimate act of apparent humility occurred on December 6, 1273, St. Nicholas’s Day, when he was forty-eight or forty-nine years old. Aquinas was celebrating Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas, and he again had a vision. What exactly he saw is unknown. But afterward, he did not resume his dictation as he usually would. Reginald prodded him to get back to work, but Aquinas responded, “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.” He stopped writing altogether, leaving his Summa Theologiae—the summary of theology, and his masterwork—incomplete.

“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”
~Randall Jarrell, “Ten Books” (The Southern Review, Autumn 1935)

François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire tends to share the most profound observation: “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”

However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth … steps in and does something. So, the poet Robert Frost said, "no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader".
Is it more foolish to risk your life or risk wasting your life? To live at all is miracle enough ...

Q. How did you get into philosophy in the first place?
A. Failure
— a soulmate, Simon Critchley

MEdia Dragons are keen observers of leadership and politics in all its drama and absurdity.

“My theory has always been to write a real small story against a big background.”
~ Burt Kennedy

As Dr Cope once observed about knowledge and wisdom "...all the data in the world is in the ocean, however the value is in the fish"

There’s so much that’s unsayable and unspeakable about Iron Curtain escapes, but when it comes time for the story to be told, it takes over...There is more to it than any summary could hope to capture.

Dylan Thomas pointed out that the best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps ... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
— Henry Green

Cold River is like a secret image, a photograph is a secret about a secret. It is about surviving and playing the cards that are dealt you, even if it looks like a losing hand. The more it tells you the less you know... The anthropological folkloric tale is about the strange relationship between a secret and knowledge. A secret is, necessarily, relational—like difference, it needs another just to exist, whether to be shared in confidence or because it cannot be shared. It is a perfect book for paranoid times ...

'This story is more than a history of escapes. It’s not easy to say where, exactly, you would shelve it. It could be under memoir. Or is it more like anthropology? . . . The other option would be farce just like the life under communism ...
The aim of Cold River is to prepare a person for death...

"We all know that funny feeling of filthiness, of contagious ickiness. It's a feeling we call the prick of conscience when we make a compromise that we have doubts about. So we think about it again and again, and... we even worry about it somewhat, even though the compromise may have made life easier, compared to what would have happened had we not made it. But for myself...I see that my bravery comes out of cowardice, because I am afraid of feeling that ickiness of feeling that I've done something wrong, that I've made an undesirable compromise, that I've side-stepped; and conversely when I do something that I know is right, I can even have a feeling of euphoria."
~ Vaclav Havel

"We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia and their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respect to them and their cultures, and elders past and present."

Frequently, one of the best ways to get insight into a culture is through its humour ...
So under communism when we wanted to hear God laugh, we made meticulously planned escapes from the totalitarian regimes. Our young fragile ironic stories under totalitarianism were not crying out to be told. And yet ....

Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Like the ForeReads or Outline, Cold River and Media Dragon are not for everyone. It's for bohemians like you...
Outline

Good blogging like journalism is sharing what somebody else does not want printed; everything else is public relations... It is our business to know something about every subject – or to know where to get the knowledge (Dr Cope, J Hatton, MO'N etc ) One of our strengths is finding stories in unexpected places ...

MEdia Dragons are known for their 6-foot-2 stature and are often expected by totalitarian characters to play villains... There’s a deeper poetry and music that runs through and beneath the Cold River...

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."
~Matthew 7:7 (Ask, Seek, Knock )

Consider why you should not go through life without seeking Simon Sinek or seeking the story of the Cold River ...Please suspend your disbelief: “I write about my father and mother, their generation, and my own limited experience, our struggle for individual freedom and self-expression in the Mitteleuropean Orwelean society. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it. We need to remember that all rivers are fearless and free. They come and go as they please, and borders or governments do not bind them. All rivers are filled with liquid histories and stories. Shame, failure, despair, utter horror, these are all stations on the journey, even after completing a ‘draft of a draft.' Slavic Blues Memoir, the offspring of the slave narrative ...
Certain stories that get virtually no traction nevertheless involve phenomena that are quite important in understanding the way the world operates. For instance, not a lot of people know that 'Cold River' is everywhere as it is the history of the entire world: As every of the tyrant it has deposed ...
Many things in life – oh so many more than we think – can never be explained at all...
“One must be something in order to do something,” Goethe counseled a young friend in 1824 ..." Our story emerges from our bones! And why we are not satisfied with simply making an impression; why do we want to mark our readers and listeners for life?"

Great writing is like diving: anybody can get from the platform to the pool—or the pavement—but some, with grace and sweat and just a bit of swag, can make that brief passage through the air angelic in its beauty and terror. “We started talking about dying long before the first one of us jumped ...

"No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border when you see your whole city running as well. You have to understand that no one puts children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land."
~ 'Home' by Warsan Shire

If you are in the business of finding out what’s true — whether that business is social science, military intelligence, journalism, the hard sciences or something else — there is an elusive quality you find among the best in the field. It might be called the Cold Eye. It’s not a term you will find in textbooks. It’s a matter of character as much as professional skill. It’s some combination of having the mental discipline to gird yourself against your own biases, the instinct to resist the tendency to think that knowledge once learned is static and an ability to look at more signals, data points and ideas from disparate places than other people usually do.
Perhaps more important, the Cold Eye is motivated by a deep intellectual independence and a passionate psychological connection to telling the truth.
~ Tom Rosenstiel

I even ignored advice to change my name ... If I wasn't Jozef Imrich, I'd probably think that Jozef Imrich has a lot of answers myself.

Most writers waste people’s time with too many words. I’m trying to reduce everything
down to the minimum. My last work will be a blank piece of paper.
— Beckett

What an ordinary, artificial life I’ve led. And how ordinary and artificial it is to write about it, as if for ‘posterity’. What do I have to say? In an absolute sense, nothing. And that’s what I’m saying.
— Frenet, Journal

... “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr
“Show me somethin’ dat caution ever made!”
~ Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Freedom or Death: Ondrej a Milan
"I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The Totalitarian is the enemy

There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which extreme communists or rotten capitalists won’t sink if they think they can grab power or make money out of it...

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.

We can only compare Cold River to reading the Bible :-) So escape the beaten path ...

When you read your own work as something fresh, something strange, it can be very exciting – especially if there’s time to make revisions. But then, once published, you almost inevitably discover typos, mistakes, and causes for regret and even remorse. As in a lover’s quarrel, sometimes we wish we could take the words back. But it’s almost never possible. …

Breaking News

“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

Support Us by Supporting Our Trendsetter
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because this is where the magic happens.
It may seem really strange but I feel as though I actually died some time ago and I’m living in an afterlife. Only in the age of Amazon.com age is a Tale like Cold River by Imrich possible … in 21st century after all,the greatest things in life are shared on the web
Cold River: fast-moving digital waters

“If you know how to read, you do not need many books […] Learn to meditate on a few lines, even from a mediocre author; nothing bears fruit unless it is rooted in meditation.”
~ Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861), the French priest who reestablished the Dominican Order after it was neutralized following the French Revolution

We are not the wordly boys we used to be on the interrete. We are no longer desirable, We are off-putting in some way. It’s not just that We have put on weight, or that our face are puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over us, they can see it in my face, the way we hold ourselves the way we move ...

Maybe we are crazy. Maybe we will change the world: If you live life to the point of tears every Negative has a Positive, You just have to look for it. Blogs Help to filter the world ;-) Without Struggle/No Freedom ...

Sole survivors might often be thought of as anonymous, but we never want to be voiceless. Why true stories and icebergs say so much ... The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Till taught by pain or borders less travelled, men really know not what freedom's worth: # Each Age Calls forth its own Bohemian Voice... Elena Ferrante

Sandra Cisneros tells us, Write about what makes you different.
Your readers want to see the world through your eyes ... A sole survivor explores the world where the 'other' fears to tread and creates the most unlikely true story you'll ever read. You are different and so is Cold River:

There may be no greater act of bravery for someone with a fear of needles than to donate blood. Of course, it's this kind of giving that is so important to maintaining the Red Cross's life-saving stocks

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist, wrote Salman Rushdie. The Iron Curtain came down since Rushdie's novel, the Satanic Verses, earned the Booker Prize-winning novelist death threats, but the question persists.

MEDIA DRAGON We search the world ... So you can read thoughtful and down to earth media dragons at one place

Can one person make a difference? It's easy to be cynical about the power of one. But a person's importance, so difficult to quantify in life, is perhaps more easily measured in death – and the gaping holes left behind